DIY flatbed printer

[dsm]

I am looking at options for one-off small format printing on a number of substrates, particularly 0.5mm steel or aluminium and 1.0mm acrylic sheet. The size of the materials is about 105mm in diameter, and possibly later 100mm square.

So far I have used laser printer printing on Avery Durable Heavy Duty White Laser Labels and sticking on the acrylic sheet for car instrument faces as an experiment. I am not sure about the durability being exposed to UV light and heat.

Would inkjet be a better option? I was looking at our Brother MFC-J825DW and have been considering modifying spare CD/DVD carriers to accept these sizes. I notice the MFC-J825DW has black pigment ink which would be more durable than the dye ink. Alternatively I could pick up a second-hand epson.

 

[costadinos]

Any pigment inkjet would be much better in terms o fade resistance (the Brother you mention uses only black pigment, the rest of the colours are dyes, they are going to fade pretty fast in the sun).

The ideal would be to print using an all pigment printer and then laminate the print. As for which printer to use, the Brother is capable of using pigment ink if you use it with refillable cartridges.

Another solution would be to use a pigment primer on the substrate directly (so that the ink will adhere) and use a printer that can print on thick media to print directly on it. The R2000/R3000/R2880/3800/4900 etc all use pigment inks and can print on media up to 1.5mm thick (you can feed it from the front manually).

 

[PeterBJ]

I think this printing job is similar to direct printing of circuit boards. Many DIY'ers have converted ordinary Epson printers into flatbed printers for this purpose. Epsons are preferred because their piezo electric printheads can handle the special (solvent base?) inks needed for this task. Brother printers probably also use piezo electric print heads. Ordinary water based inks are no good as etch resist, and thermal print heads as used by Canon, HP and others cannot handle the special inks. A link to a DIY flatbed printer here: http://www.instructables.com/id/Converting-an-Inkjet-Printer-to-Print-PCBs/

But aluminium and probably also acrylic is difficult to get paint and probably also ink to adhere properly to. Aluminium is treated with a special etch primer before painting, I don.t know about acrylic.